"This centaur-work, half poem, half prose…is a creation of perfect beauty, symmetry, strangeness, originality and moral truth. Pretending to be a curio, it cannot disguise the fact that it is one of the great works of art of this century." —Mary McCarthy, The New Republic
"As a literary tour de force it surpasses anything else Mr. Nabokov has done." —Atlantic Monthly
"Scintillating, brilliantly inventive…[Pale Fire] has almost as many layers of meaning as an artichoke has petals." —Commonwealth
"Of all [Nabokov’s] inventions, Pale Fire is the wildest, the funniest and the most earnest. It is like nothing on God’s earth." —New York Herald Tribune
"A monstrous, witty, intricately entertaining work . . . done with dazzling skill." —Time
"Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically." —John Updike
